


The Things We Fear

by Tattered_Dreams



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: F/F, Fix It, Gen, Insomnia, M/M, Nightmares, Safe Haven, Trauma, and also doesn't, fears, life goes on - Freeform, mostly - Freeform, movie-verse, post tdc, some slight horror, vague and ambiguous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27921268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: They all nearly died in the last city but they made it to Vince's Safe Haven against all the odds. There's a lot of things to deal with and they're all a little broken but, for now at least, life goes on.Unfortunately, so do Newt's nightmares.
Relationships: Gally/Minho (Maze Runner), Harriet/Sonya | Elizabeth "Lizzy" (Maze Runner), Newt/Thomas (Maze Runner)
Comments: 32
Kudos: 100
Collections: Maze Runner Secret Santa 2020





	The Things We Fear

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Christmas to my giftee!
> 
> (rated for a few depictions of fears and horrors - canon typical)

Newt always wakes up just as the knife comes down.

He’s screaming inside his own head, watching his own white-knuckled grip around the same blood-crusted hilt that he’s holding every time this happens. Thomas is a blur behind the sharp focus of the serrated edge of the blade. He brings it down, and Thomas shouts, and Newt lurches upright in the bed.

Air rattles around inside his lungs and Newt chokes on it. The memory of sickly-sweet air clogging his chest falls away with the rest of the nightmare, reminding him he’s been breathing in the sea for weeks now. His heart beats ferociously between his ribs and his fingers flex restlessly around the edge of the blankets. He remembers, like always, that he hasn’t held a knife since then.

There’s a slow shift on the mattress next to him, and Newt lowers himself back to the pillows. The sleep-warm weight pressed to his side is achingly familiar, and as a minute or so slips past, Newt feels Thomas move. Fingers reach out and wrap around his wrist, gentle but unapologetic, tangled and lost between the blankets. He doesn’t shy away; the press of a thumb over his arrhythmic pulse is like an anchor at sea.

Thomas’ fingers curl more tightly, and then he lets go. It’s dark and still and the sound of their breathing fills the world. Newt can just see the sloping outline of Thomas’ shoulder as he sinks back into the mattress. The weight of his gaze is warm and heartbreaking.

“You want to talk about it?” Thomas asks quietly.

Newt’s throat closes up.

Every time he closes his eyes he remembers his mind slipping away. He dreams about coughing up blood, seeing everything in shades of red, trying to kill Thomas with his bare hands, putting a gun to his skull with the roar of a poisoned heartbeat in his ears. That’s when he can sleep at all. Sometimes, on purpose, he holds his breath so long his head feels like it’s going to burst, just so he can be sure that his lungs are still working the rest of the time. He gets an itch walking through the grass or putting on a new sweater and he panics. The world goes numb and he can’t see straight until he’s checked his arm to make sure the veins haven’t come back.

Not that it matters. It can't, because Newt knows he’s not the only one who isn't coping well. Minho still has nightmares of nightmares; Gally flinches sometimes at things that never used to faze him; Brenda runs a lot. For a while there, Thomas really thought he was going to have to kill Newt - to stop him becoming something worse, even if he wouldn't do it for self preservation.

Newt knows it, and he wouldn’t have blamed him, but Thomas is still doing that enough for both of them. Newt tried to kill him; Thomas thought he’d have to, and there’s so much pain gouged into those two lightning fast minutes of a shared memory.

The last thing he wants is for Thomas to have to deal with the mess in his head on top of his own problems.

Newt swallows and shakes his head against the pillow. “No.”

He doesn’t want to talk.

He feels Thomas nod softly beside him, his voice yielding into the dark. “Okay.”

Eventually, Newt falls back to sleep.

༻༺

Sonya and Harriet don’t get wedding rings.

They could have asked Gally to make them a set in the forge, but they don’t. They have their reasons, Newt knows. Maybe it feels too easy to lose; just an iron band on a beach. Maybe it’s because they’ve all been prisoners enough in this life and more metal closing on skin feels too much like the same when it should be a celebration. Newt doesn’t ask them.

They just get each other and that’s more than enough.

The wedding isn’t what Newt thinks one looks like, in the memories he has that he doesn’t truly own. He thought, pieced together abstractly from some other world, that weddings used to look like aisles, flowers, white dresses and tiered cakes. There were crisply tailored suits folded around broad shoulders, a white lace train dragging petals across the floor, and a piece of music that he’s never heard but he knows what it is all the same.

Sonya and Harriet’s doesn’t look like that. It’s laughter and grief tied together, beautiful but hurting, like barbed wire wrapped in silk. The camp scatters in the sand like shrapnel around the glow of a bonfire and they stay for hours, deep into the night. The soft rushing sound of the sea mixes with the hum of voices and the spit of logs aflame, a soundtrack that washes out over the coast. Newt can’t see much sitting by the fire; the rippling heat of it and the dancing embers blot out everything else, cocooning the flickering pool of light in velvet black. He only sees the ocean when he stumbles away from the festivity.

The surf is a silvery, hypnotic thing under the fragile curve of a low-slung moon.

Newt feels his leg twinge dully, sand finding its way into his boots. His head is muffled with the swigs of sweetened alcohol he’s been tipping to the back of his throat since it was still light.

Sonya and Harriet share their first kiss as wives on the shoreline, haloed by the fire as it stretches for the distant stars.

༻༺

“We’re going to need to shift the rotations,” Vince says over breakfast one morning. There’s a chorus of half-hearted groans and Vince rolls his eyes, waving them off with a fork in his hand. “Yeah, yeah, all you princesses can just suck it.”

“What’s the problem?” Jorge asks. His voice rumbles a little with leftover sleep. He’s reclined in his chair, arm over the back without a care.

“Tools. And weapons,” Vince says, sweeping his eyes around the room. “We need to make some because the ammo we got for the guns - it ain’t gonna last. So I’ve got to work in a new chore for the rota and anyone who thinks they can make something decent, come find me.”

He trudges out of the mess hall, and it’s been over a month, but Newt still thinks there’s something just...a little less about his silhouette when there isn’t a rifle on his back.

“Gally?” Frypan throws out across their table, barely looking up.

Gally throws a bit of wild garlic at him. “I have a job,” he says, but he looks pensive as Minho stands and starts gathering up plates next to him. “I might be able to do something with that, though.”

Minho knocks his elbow across Gally’s shoulder as he heads for the kitchen with their dishes, and Gally watches him go, a preoccupied look on his face. Newt turns away from it, trying not to think about weapons, because it just makes him think of that knife, and he catches Thomas’ eyes instead.

Thomas is watching him. There’s a quietness to it that’s somehow soothing and Newt feels that tiny knotted thought of more weapons slowly loosen at the back of his brain. He raises an eyebrow. A smile flickers across Thomas’ mouth before he shakes his head.

“It’s smart,” he allows, with a small shrug.

He means Vince, and Newt - for as much as he doesn’t want to touch a knife again - agrees.

“He didn’t get this far being an idiot,” Newt points out, and Frypan snorts into his mug. Thomas smiles again, and this time it settles on his face. Newt kind of wants to stay here with them for a while and hold onto that, but even if Vince is going to move the rotas around, they still have jobs to get to today. “Alright, come on.”

He gestures at the whole table, but can’t quite help reaching out as he stands up; the back of his hand knocking into the side of Thomas’ knee, and that’s all it takes for him to twist up out of his chair to follow.

༻༺

Newt has a callus forming on the back of his thumb.

He also might be left-handed. Sort of.

It’s funny sometimes, the mess of contradictions that he is. He knows things that people should never have to learn about themselves, and lacks things that they normally would. He knows the recoil of a rifle in his shoulder but not his own age; he knows the way desperation turned to terror when he started to freefall but not which hand he prefers to write with.

The callus on the back of his thumb is from the fletching of an arrow.

Vince’s plan to make tools and weapons is put into practice and they learn to make bows the old way. It feels a bit like the remains of the world have been flung back several centuries.

Then Newt learns to shoot the bows, because they can always make more of those, but Vince is right; eventually the bullets will run out and they need to provide for themselves. There is more ammunition out there in the world, but venturing into it means facing how they left it. (Blood, ruins, bad memories and insanity - that’s all there is). No one is ready for that, so they lay down the guns, put them somewhere safe, and start teaching themselves from scratch.

(Jorge wants to make a crossbow, but so far all the attempts are failures. Longbows are just easier).

“You’re left-handed?” Vince asks him once, with one of those raised eyebrows. It’s an expression that says if he had more energy for it, he’d be surprised or impressed, but he wears himself thin on keeping the camp running these days.

“Not sure,” Newt responded at the time, shrugging. He had looked at the bow between his hands; a roughly whittled and steam-curved arch of hickory, strung tight on a waxed cord. He knows it’s hickory; he was more certain of that than what month it was or whether he was meant to survive this long.

“Try the other way,” Vince suggested.

Newt turned it over. It felt wrong, at first; knocking the arrow into the string and lifting it on the opposite side. That had faded, though, and now he finds it feels much the same no matter how he holds it.

“Congrats, Kid; you’re ambidextrous,” Vince had said, characteristically gruff, but he actually almost smiled.

They started with flint-knapped arrowheads until Gally went to work forging ones for them. His are sleeker, smaller, and they fly true. They tried several types of wood before they found one that could handle the strain. These are skills that humanity mastered hundreds of years ago, but they left those behind, too. (There’s a pattern here, Newt finds himself thinking sometimes; everything gets left behind eventually. Maybe it was just humanity’s turn). 

A bow splinters apart on Jorge on one of their early hunts and Sonya has to pull the shards out of the side of his head. A string snaps on Frypan and the welt over the back of his hand takes three weeks to heal.

They get better.

The bows improve, and so does their aim. They don’t go hungry. Newt starts to get a matching callus on his other hand.

༻༺

Newt wakes up in the middle of the night. It’s more of the same; he doesn’t think he ever stopped long enough to consider this a relapse.

It’s not cold. The sun flares seared the planet and there’s still too much heat in the atmosphere, burning up. Earth might not be inhabitable long before they get the chance to grow old, but they don’t know. Perhaps ignorance is bliss. It’s what they have, and it means that even in the dark of the night, the air is balmy and thick.

Newt feels cold sweat sticking his shirt to his back. The memory of disease coating his lungs makes him want to throw up, to get rid of it, in any way he can. The nightmarish images themselves fall away from him snarling and hateful, like they’re disappointed they lost their chance. They followed him and now they crawl into the shadows and under the beds; women, children, WCKD soldiers, strangers and friends, all of them cranks beyond help. There’s Winston and Chuck with lifeless marbled eyes, blood still fresh on their grey skin, moving disjointed and wrong, all of them finding somewhere to wait for him to fall prey to sleep again.

(They might be waiting for him to fall prey to something even worse).

Newt shakes on the bed, horror ravaging his insides and links his fingers around his opposite wrist like a bracelet. He grips tighter and tighter until he can feel his own pulse reverberate up his arm.

There’s no inky spider web of blackened veins spearing out under his skin.

He’s safe.

The panic recedes, and when he inhales, the smell of sea salt, brine and melted moonlight floods his lungs. The sweet metal taste of blood and sickness filling his throat like tar has gone. His shirt still sticks to his spine and he can feel the tight, pulled skin on his face where he’s cried in his sleep.

Thomas isn’t there.

Newt’s throat closes up and he tries hard to swallow past it.

He doesn’t know how to say anything to him, not about this, but he’s gotten used to him being there all the same. Even though Newt can’t find the words, Thomas is a constant, feels like he always has been, and the mattress feels too big, cold and remote when he’s gone. Sitting here alone feels like someone’s ripped away his stable ground and left the earth bare and crumbling underneath him.

“It’s second Tuesday,” a soft, slightly apologetic voice comes from the other side of the room.

Minho.

They’re still making all the big decisions about what happens after. They’re not even sure if this is where they’ll stay, so despite the intervening time since Thomas almost died and they left the city to burn itself out, they’re still being frugal with buildings. This room, tacked onto a small common area, is one of a handful of dorms at this end of the beach. They’ve placed beds almost wherever they’ll fit and decided who to share with amongst themselves.

Minho usually shares with Gally - something that Newt suspects has more to it than strictly necessity - but tonight he sits up and he’s alone.

Of course.

Second Tuesday.

Newt forces himself to lay back down, the pillow cold at the back of his neck, and he breathes hard out, looking at the ceiling. He can’t make himself close his eyes. Sleep feels like it might drown him.

He wants to reach across the empty side of the bed because reaching for Thomas has become habit but he doesn’t give in. He already knows it’s cold and he doesn’t want to feel it.

“Want company?”

Minho asks gently, but without apology.

Newt hates being weak. He also hates to disturb the others - they all have enough of their own issues they’re trying to learn to live past - but this is Minho. They’ve been through far worse than this, and it’s always easier when his best friend has his back. Besides, Newt has tried this alone before and it never works.

So he nods into the dark. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and Minho gets up and crosses over to him without a word.

Minho sinks down onto Thomas’ side of the bed and lays flat close enough that they press shoulder to shoulder. Newt swallows hard on the rushing, irrational thought that someone else being in their bed is wrong and his instinct is to recoil. The thought goes down his throat like broken glass.

He and Thomas share because neither of them sleeps well apart. Too much loss and pain and fear pervades when they try. They’re not sharing for the same reasons that Gally and Minho are, or Sonya and Harriet in the neighbouring dorm.

(Vaguely, Newt’s aware that he’s jealous of that in a way that burns, when he lets it, when he’s not numb with relief that Thomas even trusts him enough to sleep in easy reach. In the end, though, that matters more. If it’s all he gets, that’s okay too. He tried to _kill_ him-).

A creak from another mattress in the room drops the thought out of Newt’s head like a stone.

Brenda hasn’t stirred in her own bed. She swapped with Aris right back at the start. He sleeps easier if he’s with the girls left from his maze, and Brenda when she’s near them. No one argued about that, either.

Newt listens to her turn over and settle again. She doesn’t share, but she did give Frypan a black eye by mistake when he tried to shake her awake once, so that’s probably for the best. She sleeps better than the rest of them, most nights. Brenda has a lifespan of memories of the scorch, so maybe she’s already adjusted to her nightmares. The rest of them have only now started to sort through the horrors crammed into just three years.

It goes quiet and still again. Newt adjusts to the different rhythm of Minho’s steady breaths at his side and they help the darkness in his head. He lays there for long, slow-dripping minutes before he realises that even though he doesn’t feel spooked now, he definitely can’t sleep.

He still dreams of dying.

He dreams of his mind unravelling in bloody tendrils, his hands aching as his fingers flex into claws and his gums sore like he’s cutting new teeth. He still wakes up airless, remembering a knife in his hand, flashing silver as he fought to sink it into Thomas’ throat.

Newt lays awake long after Minho falls back to sleep beside him, and the bed doesn’t feel any warmer. It’s cruel really, and Newt is familiar with irony. It’s Thomas that he’s always, still, so afraid to harm. It’s also Thomas he can’t sleep without any more.

༻༺

Aris tinkers with the radios a lot.

They have four. They all have names, and Aris talks to them. They probably worked once, in the car, ship, flightless berg and crumpled helicopter that they were found in. But since they were disemboweled, cables tearing and trailing, they’ve never made a spark or noise.

Aris persists, though, pouring hours of time into their tangled, lifeless innards, hoping that something eventually will click.

They don’t even know if there’s any point. It’s a thought too insurmountable to truly contemplate that they might be the last; that after them, that’s it. Humanity gone. It’s a nicer thought, a kinder one, that somewhere out there there’s more camps, pockets of life, maybe whole cities of people that are scraping out a living in the ruins.

If that’s true, then one of them, at least, must also have a radio.

They’re only going to know if Aris can get any of theirs working, so they let him tinker.

༻༺

It feels like limbo sometimes.

Like perhaps they all died on the way out here and now they just drift through a static afterlife on an endless loop, all of them too burdened and broken to be able to let go and move on.

They relearn how to exist, though. They make what they need, hunt when they have to, sleep when they can and watch the sea when they can’t. They’re still not sure if this is really where they want to plant roots, so they have enough to carve out routine but nothing more grows. It feels like waiting, like the whole coast is a liminal space in the eye of a needle and eventually something will push them one way or the other.

(The sea might swallow the sand and force them back to the scorch, or the end of the world might find them here and push them into the horizon, the last of humanity adrift on a resurrected ship).

༻༺

The pyre burns when the sky is a wash of indigo bleeding gold.

Having a funeral feels strange. The only death they’ve known has been bullets and blades and no time to mourn.

Newt remembers the first time he raised a gun in his hands - a Winchester 70, classic bolt action rifle, he later learned - and a man died as a direct result. He doesn’t regret it and never will. It was almost too easy, and isn’t that the nature of humanity? That there’s always something you’d be willing to kill for, to die for? It was the first time he took a life and it wasn’t the last. Everyone he knows has killed to get them here, and people have died to get them here, too, but none of them got funerals. There wasn’t time, wasn’t a place and sometimes wasn’t even a body. Goodbyes were screams of protest or tears around a trigger. All of them were left behind.

Now a small group of them gather on the outcrop of rock that casts a shadow over the camp at daybreak, and they learn what a goodbye is when you get to say it.

They weren’t anyone Newt knew. Newt doesn’t remember his name, just knows he was one of the crew Vince brought from the mountain. Newt doesn’t even know why he died, he only cares that it wasn’t the Flare.

The pyre burns until there’s nothing left, all through the day. Camp bustles morosely on underneath it, the smoke acrid in the air for hours and when it’s done, they just let the ashes blow out over the water. The earth where it stood is scarred from the heat; hard and black and barren.

The tough coast grass and bracken on the cliffside will never grow there again.

It’s not the last body they burn.

༻༺

At least losing someone, seeing them die and burn and be gone, proves that the rest of them are alive.

༻༺

Slowly, it gets easier to breathe.

༻༺

Brenda used to run all the time.

“You weren’t really with it,” Minho said to Newt at the start, which was a tactful way of saying he was trying to murder Thomas with his bare hands. “But it was a close call. She almost wasn’t fast enough to get to you, and that almost is enough to be killing her.”

Newt knew then, with sharp clarity, that Brenda is afraid of that almost the same way that he is afraid of his.

(He never would have blamed her, never would have dreamed of holding her responsible for not making it on time, but the way she held onto it and feared it was something he could relate to).

Brenda doesn’t run so much now, Newt realises one day.

She can still be seen at first light, down on the edge of the coast, splashing through the far out surf and silhouetted by the pale nimbus of light breaking apart the horizon. She sprints, she doesn’t jog. It’s not frantic any more, though; it’s wilful.

“How did it get easier?” Newt asks her.

She looks up. He caught her off-guard, without warning, and she’s in the middle of flexing a new bow into shape around their straining pegs in a corner of Gally’s forge. Newt thinks absently of the silvery scars on the backs of his hands and how a bow feels better between them than a rifle ever did. (He still hasn’t touched a knife since the city, since his own haunting _almost_ ). In contrast it’s no secret that Brenda misses her gun now that they’re rationing bullets, but she’s good at making bows.

Her expression clears slowly as she realises what he’s asking, but there’s no pity there. She’s blunt, like she always is, and the familiarity of it is a balm to the raw nerves under Newt’s skin.

The forge is thick with steam from the long pans of water on heat; the fire stoked white hot underneath. 

“I forgave myself,” she replies. “I was the only one who could.”

༻༺

“Did you really bring alcohol on Watch?” Newt asks.

He raises an eyebrow at the mason jar that Gally is tugging out of his backpack, and Gally shoots him a withering look.

“No.” He stretches to offer it out and Newt takes it from him, a little dubiously. Gally says, “It’s fruit juice. Some of the kids were able to gather quite a bit and Fry put them on it in the kitchen. It’s good.”

Newt lays his bow down on the rock beside him. The half-dead woodland spread in tatters below is still and silent. Nothing ever really shows up, but it’s hard to just stop the sentry duty when it’s been ingrained for so long. He twists the lid off the jar and sniffs carefully at the sloshing contents.

It smells like fruit; something citrus and spiky, and when he tips back a mouthful it explodes with an eye-watering tartness at the back of his tongue. Newt coughs, chokes and blindly sets the jar aside. Of course Gally likes it; it’s nearly toxic. It is fruit though, he’ll allow him that.

“Bloody h-” he wheezes. “He needs to water that down.”

“Yeah,” Gally agrees blandly - a bit too blandly. Newt looks up, blinking tears, and registers the smirk on his friend’s face. Gally digs back into the backpack and pulls out a bottle; recognisable from the fermenting store-room. They might as well start calling this berry-based drink ‘Blatant lies’. “That’s why I brought alcohol.”

They make it last, and carefully soak it up with rations of fluffy bread, but it makes their afternoon surveying the valley behind Haven pass quicker.

༻༺

Newt wakes up in the night and Thomas curves around him like a silent question mark.

Newt breathes him in and the nightmare fades; hooks in his mind that sting as they come loose and shapes with dead eyes recoiling into the shadows. Thomas doesn’t say anything. He just curls his fingers around Newt’s wrist firmly, not as hard as Newt does it, but the same way because he knows all of Newt’s coping mechanisms now. The pressure sinks into his bones instantly and his pulse stops ricocheting through his veins. Newt doesn’t need to scrabble through the blankets to check the inside of his elbow in the dark. Under Thomas’ touch, he feels real.

Thomas has a callus on the side of his thumb and Newt can feel it on the thin skin over his tendons. It’s a pinprick of sensation compared to the way Thomas’ whole body is pressed around him, but the easy intimacy in it is a heavy, living thing. Newt feels a bit like he’ll break apart and it’s a real toss up for a second there whether this - being so close but not enough - hurts more or less than the nightmare he broke free from.

“I got you,” Thomas murmurs to him. He keeps his voice low as the others sleep soundly on, but he’s definitely awake. “Go back to sleep.”

Newt isn’t ready to talk, but the dark is insidious and suddenly he’s scared. He’s scared that this - close but not enough - is something he won’t get to keep.

(That’s what hurts worse, no denying it. He’d rather have pieces of Thomas than none of him).

“Are you ever afraid of me?” he asks.

“No,” Thomas says.

Newt breathes, hesitates a moment, and then, forced up his throat- “Even-”

The knife. His weight immobilising Thomas on the cracked concrete as the world burned down-

“You didn’t do anything that needs to be forgiven, Newt.” The words are strong and gentle next to his ear. Newt’s pulse jumps; he feels it under Thomas’ thumb and in the back of his throat. “You were sick. I know you’ve heard it a lot but the only one left to convince is you.”

“I can’t talk about it,” Newt says. It feels like a confession and an admission of weakness for a hanging moment until Thomas shifts even closer. He’s a line of heat down Newt’s body, warm (always so warm), his heart beating fiercely into Newt’s shoulder blade and they’re almost sharing one pillow. Nightmares can’t get through him, they never do.

“You don’t have to,” Thomas whispers.

It occurs to Newt then, that maybe that’s true. None of them have exactly sat down to discuss the horrors they lived through, but they know the things in each other’s nightmares anyway. He knows that when Thomas wakes up with harsh breaths pressed between gritted teeth, it’s because in his nightmares, he has to pull a trigger, and Newt is the one who dies. Thomas didn’t want to say it out loud and Newt stopped asking.

Maybe that’s why Newt believes it when Thomas says to him, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t. I’m not going anywhere. You’ve just gotta stop being afraid of yourself.”

They all know a bit about that.

Newt falls asleep with the weight of Thomas’ arm across his rib-cage.

༻༺

“I’ll trade you the washing up.”

That’s laughable. Newt snorts. “Not a chance.”

“Aw come on,” Frypan whines, hands in the air. “You hate inventory.”

For the last time; it’s not that he hates it, it’s that it’s mind-numbing and he’d had quite enough of that before they reached Haven. Newt just barely manages not to roll his eyes. “It’s not-”

“That you hate it-I know,” Frypan cuts him off, and he definitely does roll his eyes. “But y-”

Whatever he was going to come back with is cut off as Brenda drops unceremoniously down in the sand beside them. She dusts off her hands over the ashy, cold fire pit then leans back against the log behind her, eyes closed and face turned up to the sun.

Frypan and Newt share a look.

“Hard day?” Frypan asks her tentatively.

“Not as hard as some,” she remarks, somewhere between amused and coolly detached. “I can’t put the next bow on the steam rack because Gally and Minho are using the forge for recreational activities.”

Newt coughs that mental image up and Frypan’s eyes go round.

“Well damn,” he says, at the same time Newt winces, “In the forge?”

“Yep,” Brenda says brightly. “So I’m having a fantastic day because now both of them are taking my shift as compensation and I won the betting pool. How’s the morning going for you two?”

“Want to trade the washing up?” Frypan asks dully.

Newt smirks and drops his head to try to hide it. There’s no chance Brenda will take on the washing up if she’s just managed to fob off her last shift of the week to Minho and Gally, and Frypan knows it.

“He’s desperate,” Newt adds, just because he can.

“Sucks to be you,” Brenda says.

Frypan groans out loud and throws a handful of sand over his shoulder. “You get the afternoon off, Gally and Minho are screwing around - I hope one of them gets an arrowhead up their-”

“Don’t-” Newt interrupts, wincing again.

“-and Newt won’t even trade inventory,” Frypan continues.

Brenda opens her eyes for the first time since joining them, turning to face them with a sudden genuine softening to her smile. “Oh yeah,” she says. “Jorge told me Vince moved inventory to Second Tuesdays. That’s better...right?”

Newt ignores the way Frypan’s gaze has suddenly swung back to him in realisation, and he nods. “Yeah, it’s better,” he agrees.

Thomas still does night patrols with Harriet on Second Tuesdays, and despite the time spilling onward, Newt still struggles to sleep much at all when he’s not there. Inventory might be mind-numbing, but he’d rather do that on nights he knows he won’t sleep anyway than face lying in the empty bed for hours, just staring at the ceiling.

Frypan clearly doesn’t need him to explain any of that.

He just nods once and then pulls a new smile onto his face as he stands up. “Y’all are the worst,” he says, without any heat at all and a great deal of fondness.

“Ask Aris,” Brenda suggests. “He pulled foraging duty. You might be able to sweet-talk him.”

Newt watches Frypan head off up the beach towards camp, sinking into the sand with every step. Hopefully someone will come through for him.

“Why’s he want to get out of washing up so much?” Brenda asks idly.

Newt turns back to her, rolling his tongue behind his teeth to stop himself laughing. “Rumour is a crab bit him last time.”

༻༺

Gally makes Frypan a new set of kitchen knives in the forge. Jorge and Brenda pitch the idea of going further afield on hunting parties, not wanting to put a void into the ecosystem surrounding the camp. Minho claims to have seduced Gally, though Newt thinks, to Thomas and Frypan’s endless amusement, that it probably didn’t take all that much effort. Harriet asks when they’ll tie the knot. Brenda did win the betting pool. Jorge finally makes a crossbow that works and now half the camp wants one. Aris wakes up half the camp thinking one of the radios might have found a signal, only to discover a family of crickets have taken up squatting rights inside the plastic casing.

For the first time, Newt dreams of dropping the knife and kissing Thomas instead.

(It’s not the first time he’s thought about it, or even dreamt of it, but it is the first time that this particular memory has veered away from horrors even greater than the parts that were real).

He wakes up hard and wrung out and curled around Thomas in the early hours.

For the first time, it felt like he was in control, and it’s like seeing a light at the end of a (long, twisted, diseased) tunnel.

༻༺

“Sorry,” Thomas mutters, a little hazy and thick and half-asleep, as he sinks into the chair next to Newt’s a few mornings later.

Newt looks up at him, more amused than he probably should be, but feeling alive and warm under the absent-minded weight of Thomas’ hand on his back. “Morning, Tommy,” he says, smirking. “You overslept.”

Thomas groans gently, hand falling away from Newt to press over his eyes. The other side of their little table, Harriet is curled blearily over her mug and the two of them look like mirrored images. Sonya presses her lips to swallow a laugh and rubs Harriet’s shoulder with a delicate mix of tenderness and delight.

“Patrol run later than usual?” Minho asks, sinking down on Newt’s other side and passing out bowls of scrambled eggs.

Harriet whines into her cup and Thomas just shakes his head.

“That well, huh?” Sonya says sympathetically.

Gally appears over Minho’s shoulder and dumps a handful of cutlery in the middle of the table for people to pick at before stealing his own chair from somewhere else. No one protests; the mess hall is mostly empty now the first rush of people who have early shifts on the rota have already left.

Sonya digs in for a spoon, still rubbing Harriet’s shoulder like she’s forgotten she’s doing it.

“There’s nothing out there,” Thomas says after a moment, and heads turn to him. “And I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“It’s what we’ve got, man,” Minho says, though his face pulls in understanding. They’re all still just waiting, and none of them really know what for.

Thomas nods and sits up a little in his chair, but he’s still all sleep-soft edges and the familiar rasp at the back of his voice as he takes the offered bowl and thanks Minho. It’s magnetising, seeing pieces of Thomas that he’s usually tucked away by morning, and for an instant, Newt really wants to reach out for him. He swallows down on the impulse and settles for scooting his own chair a few inches closer as he reaches for a fork.

Thomas’ knee rocks into Newt’s under the table and stays there.

༻༺

Newt has no idea what the date is.

They’ve mapped out a calendar as best they can, but there are no shifting seasons out here, and each day bleeds into the next, and the next; time haemorrhaging with no way of stemming the flow. Seasons were burned off the surface of the planet by the sun flares, and though weeks have dripped into months, all they really have to go by is the world tilting on its axis. The place the sun pulls itself out of the water edges down the coastline and they mark off days.

They find themselves settling.

They build another pantry and another wing to the clinic. Gally gets interns at the forge and Sonya teaches some of the kids first aid. Names are added to the memorial stone in the shadow of the funeral cliff and there are three more bonfire weddings on the beach.

The dorm gets broken up - which feels like loss for a few days until they all realise it’s out of necessity. Gally and Minho can be loud. Frypan always had to creep from bed at first light one week in three in order to be in the kitchen for the breakfast shift, and now he doesn’t worry about waking anyone else. 

Newt lays the first night facing the new door that now sits between the rest of the world and the bed he still shares with Thomas. It feels like a step closer to something he still doesn’t actually have, kind of like he’s stealing it.

(He’s not sure if he’s stealing the time, the privacy, or just the fantasy. That part stings somewhere in his chest like guilt because he’s so aware that Thomas doesn’t know how much more he wants from him).

Thomas shakes from a nightmare of his own in the early hours, when the room is still cloaked and black. Newt turns away from the door, seeking him out between the blankets and holding on until he can coax the wildness from his eyes. He finally falls asleep like that; pressed into Thomas’ back with their hands twisted together as something seems to click into place. 

  
  


“Not yet,” Thomas mutters into the hollow of his throat in the morning.

Harriet is banging on some kind of drum outside, yelling at them all to wake up. Newt swallows a groan at the heat of Thomas’ body almost flattening him into the mattress and decidedly tunes her out. He nods, and maybe his fingers play with the edge of Thomas’ t-shirt. He’s almost asleep again; maybe he won’t notice.

“Go back to sleep,” Newt tells him softly.

Newt is all too aware that he won’t be able to stay forever (This morning, in a week, in a month or a year). He’ll have to get up, slide out carefully so he doesn’t disturb Thomas, and then go let Vince know that he had a rough night. It’s something they’ve all done for each other for months.

For right now, though, there’s a door between them and the world, and he can stay a bit longer.

༻༺

They lose someone else.

This time she’s one of the immunes they broke free from WCKD in the city. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen, if that. Brenda cries and spends the morning down on the beach.

“Sepsis,” Sonya informs them after.

“That hunting trip,” Harriet assumes, casting her eyes around for someone to confirm it.

She had been nursing a nasty scrape from a fall since the group had returned a few weeks ago and looking steadily worse since.

“We need to resupply,” Sonya says.

There’s naturally occurring antibiotic flora a two day hike from Haven. They’ve been there before; it’s a familiar route and half the camp knows what the different plants look like by now. Frypan isn’t on the kitchen shift that week, Thomas isn’t on night patrol and Gally arranges to leave the forge with one of the girls he’s been teaching to work it. Brenda will be on hand at the very least to make sure the new bows are properly steamed and flexed, and there’s nothing else too pressing in the meantime. Newt packs a bag and wonders what it’ll be like not sharing a bed with Thomas after so long.

They build another pyre and say goodbye at dawn. The five of them set off while the smoke is still black in the sky.

༻༺

For four days it’s just them again, the Gladers; all that’s left of them, anyway.

It’s life-affirming and lonely at the same time. So many of them fell along the way to getting here and Newt can be glad that some of them made it and still horrified at how many didn’t. Making a tiny campsite in the shell of the rotting woodland the first night, the world feels so big; far too big and empty and uninhabitable for the vestiges of the human race.

Still, it’s the first time it’s just been them, on their own. Despite the absence of the claustrophobic walls and how changed they all are by coming out on this side, something about the way they cluster around a tiny campfire feels more normal than anything else that’s left.

“Fall in the fire and you’re clearing up the mess,” Newt says flatly when Gally etches out a wide circle in the dirt.

“I’m not gonna fall,” Gally smirks. He claps his hands and shoots Minho a wicked look. “But he is.”

Minho stands up and marches into the ring he’s made, just visible at the edge of the dancing wash of firelight. He rolls up his sleeves.

“Alright, game on.”

For a second, Newt is thrown back years.

He remembers laughter and cheers bounced around the light of a bonfire, boys with no identity silhouetted against the shadow of concrete walls stretching to the sky. Gally fought all the boys back then - Nick, Alby, Winston and Jeff…

This memory isn’t like the others, the ones he’s used to waking from in a cold sweat with horror thick and icy in his bloodstream. Those ones are cutting; full of spiralling terrors that he’s not sure how he survived (that he nearly didn’t). He’s used to how those have warped, corroding the good and turning it against him. He’s woken up numerous times to the disfigured facsimiles of friends he lost but familiarity doesn’t make it less chilling to see them; decaying and vengeful and preying on his mind.

This memory isn’t any of that.

This one is what he thinks happiness once looked like.

He remembers it in shades of red and gold and fireflies against a velvet sky where he was safe even if he couldn’t leave. The glade and each other were the closest thing to home any of them had ever had.

Thomas takes a seat beside him, their backs against a crumbling log and pressed close shoulder to shoulder. It’s an echo of another time, reverberating up through history.

“Don’t you go getting any ideas,” Newt says.

Thomas snorts beside him, and it’s clear they’re remembering the same thing when he says, “Gally beat my ass once. I’m good.”

༻༺

The others have fallen asleep, curved like commas in their sleeping bags, and it’s just Newt and Thomas sat at the last glowing embers of the campfire.

There’s a reluctance to give in that itches under Newt’s skin, and the longer they both sit quietly, like trying to wait it out, the more Newt thinks it’s not just him. Thomas is tired, though; Newt is practiced at telling. That jittery energy that he encapsulates has started to leak out in the fidget of his fingers, the way his teeth rake at his lower lip and the restless rocking of his knee against the back of his hand.

“Alright, C’mon,” Newt breaks first, and prays either that he’s not wrong or that Thomas simply won’t look too deeply at his motives. “Long walk tomorrow, we need to sleep.”

Thomas swallows, and there’s a feathering in his jaw that hints, for a second, that he might protest. Newt tips his head to the side of the fire where just their sleeping bags remain, still rolled tight. It’s an invitation. Thomas’ mouth goes soft instead, and he doesn’t say a word as he gets up and follows.

They sleep on beds of dead leaves and parched peat moss for the next three nights, only when the others have turned in and never far apart. Newt wonders when Thomas stopped being able to sleep without him, too, or if he’s just seeing what he wants to see. He doesn’t think so.

Under the trees, just the two of them awake, this doesn’t feel stolen. It feels like a choice.

༻༺

Newt gets hurt on a hunting trip.

He definitely doesn’t mean to, and all in all it’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, but he knows that’s kind of a low bar, so he tries not to think about it. They find a hog of some kind and it panics when it hears them and runs at Newt rather than away. It’s not too bad; there’s some blood, some pain, and some panic, but he’s alive and he’s not imminently worried that’s about to change.

It’s not been long since they lost one of Brenda’s bus kids to the sepsis, though, so Minho freaks out a bit.

Sonya patches him up in the clinic but she’s happy that he’s going to be fine, even as she washes blood off of her hands in the sink. He’s going to have to eat antibiotic pulp for a few weeks, and possibly apply aloe vera to the wound, but he’s fine.

Thomas wasn’t there when it happened.

He’s on a rotation with Vince, Harriet and Brenda as they spread their scouting circles outward and Newt hasn’t seen him since they parted ways after breakfast.

Newt heads to their room to change out of the torn shirt he’s still wearing, but he pauses in the doorway, mild surprise sinking into easy warmth when he sees Thomas is already there.

“Hey,” Newt says automatically, and then because even if he’s always happy to see him, he didn’t think he would just yet, “Aren’t you meant to be with Vin-”

Thomas’ head snaps up. There’s something about that and the expression in his face that’s both lost and determined.

“You got injured?” The question seems to fall out of him, blood from a wound, like it’s hurt him too.

Newt feels his jaw click shut. He swallows. There’s more to it; a bold, slightly reckless energy gathering behind Thomas’ eyes and etching itself into the lines of his body. It’s only looking at it as it happens that Newt realises it’s been a while since he last saw it.

He missed it.

It’s also kick-started his pulse and he feels his heart race in his chest, percussion tattooed inside his ribs.

“Not badly,” Newt finally says when he can push the words out. It’s the truth.

Thomas exhales all the air in his lungs. For a split second he looks terrified and then that flash of impulse behaviour catches light and takes over. He surges off the bed, upright, across the gap between them and kisses Newt, hot enough to burn, hard enough to bruise.

Stunned and helpless to refuse with the thought that this is some sort of cosmic fluke, like it’s all he’ll get, Newt kisses him back blindly. A wrecked sound of shock and longing scrapes the back of his throat and Thomas coaxes his mouth open to swallow it. There’s something frantic pulled tight between them; teeth, tongue and fingers putting pressure on it like it’s a frayed, exposed nerve and Newt wonders if it’s possible to splinter apart inside your own skin from wanting something so much. From the moment they met Thomas was fighting everything with a magnetic kind of raw defiance and now Newt knows he kisses the same; the same energy and lack of apology.

(Where did he even learn to kiss? Newt quickly drops that line of thought when it makes him burn under Thomas’ hands).

He’s not sure how long it is, but it’s still not long enough when Thomas breaks away from him, sharp and breathless. Defeat flashes through his eyes before they fall away and Newt finds himself rocked by it, the taste of him already turning to memory.

“Fuck,” Thomas swears succinctly.

Newt tries to scrape together whatever bearings he has left and then swallows hard to find his voice. It comes out more wrung than he was aiming for, but he does kind of like the way Thomas fully shivers when he speaks.

“Not that I’m complaining,” he says. “But are you okay?”

“Am _I_ okay?” Thomas chokes. “Jesus. I’m not the one who almost got a boar tusk to the side, Newt.”

“Minho embellishes, you know that,” Newt points out. In the back of his mind he’s very aware that he’s diverting because this is something he knows how to do; whether they’re testing each other or supporting each other, volleying like this is home ground. He also knows it won’t work for long. He says, “I’m fine, Tommy.”

It’s still the truth, in the way Thomas means it, anyway. He’s not sure yet exactly how he feels about the kiss, about knowing things now that he can never unknow, but at least the wound in his side doesn’t really hurt and it missed everything vital.

“You almost weren’t,” Thomas says.

Newt snorts morbidly. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“No,” Thomas snaps suddenly, spinning away in agitation, and Newt’s brain stalls at the force behind it even though it wasn’t loud. “Don’t do that. I can’t- fuck. Look.” He breathes hard, forces himself to slow down and then somehow it’s scarier suddenly to see the fight slump out of his shoulders. “I didn’t mean to do this.”

“Do what?” Newt asks, confused and on edge. Fight with him? Kiss him? Both?

“Put this on you,” Thomas says, which doesn’t clear it up. “The way I- You have enough to deal with and you don’t owe me anything. I just…”

He tails off, fingers spearing through his hair and leaving it a mess as he worries into his lip with his teeth. His mouth still looks slightly red and swollen and he _kissed_ Newt-

“Well, I think it’s up to me what I can deal with,” Newt says carefully, trying to string the whole conversation together around his distraction. There’s something that feels a little too much like hope spreading like wings in his chest and he doesn’t know what to do with it. (He’s not even going to touch the bit about being owed. Newt very literally does owe Thomas his life, but Thomas doesn’t like to be reminded of it so Newt’s pretty sure it’s not what he meant). He takes a breath and asks, “So, do you wanna start again?”

Thomas pauses and finally, in a moment of stillness, snorts with self deprecating amusement. Unexpectedly softly he says, “Yeah.”

He lifts his eyes back to Newt’s. They’re dark with frustrated tension that sparks like an exposed electrical wire. (Magnetic; he’s always been magnetic, right from the start. Newt was always going to end up right here when it came to the two of them).

“You’re scared that you almost killed me?” Thomas starts. “Well I’m still scared that I almost watched you die and I can’t do that. I don’t know what that means. We’re all messed up and we were all lied to and had so much taken from us…”

He hesitates, conflict showing in the measured breaths under his collarbone and the way he bites at his mouth. Then he continues, slower now, careful, “Teresa believed I loved her once. Maybe I did, I don’t know, but I can’t trust it. I didn’t feel it. I just know what’s real to me in the memories I have.

“And Newt? You’re the most real thing there is. You’re my best friend and we survived a lot, but I also know that I thought I was going to have to watch you die months ago and I was going to lose my mind.”

Then, before Newt can even fully process that - the way the planet rocks with the words _you’re the most real thing there is_ \- Thomas is retreating again.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I’m gonna- I should-”

Before Newt can do much of anything at all, Thomas has lurched past him for the door, conflict cut into the line of his spine, and an instant later he’s gone.

Newt becomes vaguely aware that he’s shaking, that the room feels huge and empty around him, that he can’t even feel the sting of the wound at his side that seems like weeks ago now.

_What the fuck just happened?_

༻༺

Newt tracks Minho down over at the tide pools behind the kitchen where he’s up to his elbows in the salt water. He’s on the wash-rotation and stacking up dishes and cutlery in the sand when they’re done. A crab is huddled into the rock on the far side at the bottom of the water, apparently annoyed with the disturbance. They don’t take the crabs or occasional fish that wash into the tide pools for the kitchen; it doesn’t seem fair.

(Of course, that means occasionally one protests. Frypan would know).

It’s Thomas that Newt really wants to go after, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

Thomas said a lot of things that he’s probably been holding onto for a long time, and he’s not someone who usually talks readily. Hearing about Newt getting hurt clearly broke it out of him and he put space between them after for a reason. Newt won’t force him into a corner now.

So he’s hoping Minho can help him.

“Did you make it sound like I had a near death experience this morning when you told Thomas what happened?” he asks plainly.

Something in his voice must be what gets Minho to stop and actually look up at him.

“You were white as a sheet,” he says. “For a second there it looked bad, Newt.”

“But by the time you found Thomas I was being patched up and you knew it was just a scrape.”

(Okay, so it did cut the skin open, but in comparison to everything else, it feels like a scrape. It’ll be healed in a week).

“It was a near miss,” Minho corrects, and something a little sharp stabs up in his tone like a needle in skin. “I was scared for a bit there and so yeah, sorry if I also wanted to talk to my friend because I knew he’d understand.”

Fuck.

“You’re right.” Newt deflates, shame twisting in his veins and he sinks down onto the closest rock, just out of reach of the sloshing water. “I’m sorry.” Minho nods and shrugs and it’s forgotten. “I just...It scared him and now- I don’t know-”

“Yeah, well, join the club,” Minho says, but it’s not unkind. “Come on; it’s Thomas. You’ll be fine. He’s not exactly in a position to lecture anyone about injuries, is he? If you’re fighting or whatever - weird as that is - it won’t last.”

Newt remembers that Minho wasn’t there the only real time that he and Thomas did actually fight - and it wasn’t even really him. It was like flickering awake from a nightmare to find rage in his bones and his hands pinning Thomas to the wall. Newt swallows and shakes it away.

“He kissed me,” he admits.

Minho drops a plate in the pool with a resounding splash and the crab grumpily scuttles even further from them. Minho dunks his whole arm in to fish it back out.

“About time,” is all he says when he’s done.

Newt blinks. “What?”

Minho snorts. “It’s been months. You’ve had this...I dunno, man. This thing about him since the Maze. I saw it. Then I wasn’t around for six months and honestly - when we first got here after all that dust settled, I just figured you’d already started tapping that-”

“Don’t say that,” Newt scrunches his nose up.

Minho pulls a matching face. “You’re right. He’s my friend, too, that’s weird. Point is; you don’t act like friends. Brenda was the one who told me that you’re both just...like that, with each other. The two of you now, it’s more than it was before. I think he was something to you from the beginning and Thomas…” Minho sighs, shrugs. (Minho’s good at being the obnoxious, loud guy, and his ready sense of humour puts people at ease, but Newt’s known him a long time, and he knows there’s far more than that to him; there’s this sensitivity and perceptiveness, too). Minho continues, words chosen delicately, “He didn’t want to put anything else on you when you were still…”

“Messed up?” Newt supplies darkly.

Minho scowls at him. “We all are, dude. But no. You were still punishing yourself for trying to hurt him when it wasn’t even you. You were still not sleeping and scared of it. Thomas wasn’t sure if you could separate that out, or if you wanted to go back to what you had. It wasn’t the right time to ask. You should ask him this, too,” Minho points out, “but even Gally - not the most nuanced of people when it comes to emotions, I’ll give you - knows that Thomas hasn’t been sharing that bed with you all this time just to help _you_.”

Newt thinks he’d worked that one out during the camping trip, seeing Thomas’ reluctance to sleep away from him. Somehow, that takes a more solid shape now that he knows he’s not the only one who’s noticed; now that it’s not just something he saw because he wanted to.

“It’s simple,” Minho says after a moment. “He kissed you. And if maybe thinking you were in a little more danger gave him a boost to do it, then good.” It’s not quite an admission to what Newt accused him of, but it’s as good as. Newt can’t find the earlier press of annoyance, so he just rolls his eyes.

“But he did it,” Minho continues. “He probably freaked because he didn’t want to upset the balance or what you have going. But you’re not dying, and you want him, too. So go sort that out - jump him, or whatever - and be fucking happy, Newt.”

And, well. When Minho says it like that, it does sound kind of simple.

༻༺

Newt was never afraid that Thomas wouldn’t come back, and maybe that already tells him everything.

Even after Thomas broke away from him, fled the room - their room - and after seeing the reckless frustration in his eyes, Newt had never paused to doubt that he would come back.

Thomas sighs when he steps through the door, hours later, just as the sun is finally going down. It feels like a reversal and the idea of any of that repeating itself traps in Newt’s lungs enough to catch his breath for a second. Newt stays sat at the end of the bed and Thomas’ eyes drop, slant sideways across the floor. He hesitates in the doorway.

“Hey. Look, I’m s-”

“No,” Newt interrupts him. “My turn. Close the door.”

That makes Thomas look. His gaze leaps up and catches on Newt’s, wild with hope and something hot that won’t take much to fan to a flame. He swallows and Newt watches it move slick and heavy in his throat. Thomas does as he’s told and the door falls shut behind him.

“Okay,” he says, with a tiny break in his voice. Then he waits.

“There’s things that I don’t know how to say to you,” Newt starts, because this isn’t some romance novel published before the world burned up, and knowing he’s not alone in what he wants doesn’t fix everything. “I don’t know how to say them to anyone. I’m still not ready to talk about those. But...I remember the glade. I was there longer than I’ve been anywhere else, and those boys - Alby, Winston...George and Nick - boys who were gone long before you got there - they were family. And if I had the chance to go back there with them but the price was never knowing you... I couldn’t do it.”

Thomas looks frozen against the door, but his shoulders have slid against the panel, softer, and there’s something like awe coalescing on his face.

“This isn’t just you, you know,” Newt continues. The nightmares and the memories and the fears that he’s still carrying around need more time, but this he’s ready for. He’s wanted it in silence for perhaps longer than even he realises, if Minho could see it from the beginning. “I’ve been afraid you were going to die on me a lot of times, starting the night you ran into the Maze after Minho, and it hasn’t exactly gotten easier. I didn’t mean to get hurt; that’s not- it isn’t who I am any more. And I’m sorry if I or if Minho scared you. But this shit is our world. You know that.”

“You’re right,” Thomas cuts in when Newt pauses for breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry; it wasn’t fair. None of it was.”

Newt levels him a flat look. “I didn’t say that.”

For an instant it looks like Thomas barely refrains from rolling his eyes. It jars something loose somehow and the carefully still air in the room sort of snaps and bursts. All of a sudden, this is the easiest thing he’s probably ever done.

“You kissed me,” he says, and Thomas’ eyes widen, a faint flush rising through his skin. “Are you apologising for that, too?”

It definitely hadn’t felt like Thomas had any intention of being sorry about it at the time, Newt remembers that much clearly. His heart jumps in hot empathy - he’s not sorry, either - yet the way Thomas left, the apparent defeat that curved his spine and clouded his eyes said something else.

Thomas’ jaw drops a little, his mouth soft with what might be surprise, his pulse electric in the hollow of his throat. Newt sees the moment he makes a decision when that familiar reckless daring flashes through his eyes. It’s the same look from when he’d stormed towards a guard in the WCKD facility, and when he’d held a detonator between his fingers on a mountain.

“No,” he says, “No, I’m not apologising for that.”

“Good,” Newt answers. He stands up and Thomas’ eyes snap to him hot and fast.

He could ask again if Thomas is afraid of him, but he doesn’t. He trusts the answer he got. He trusts Thomas’ conviction in his decisions and for the first time in a long time, Newt feels like he trusts himself.

He pushes his hands into the pockets of the worn-out hoodie he’s wearing. It might even be one that Thomas technically owned at one point, not that it matters when they’re all sharing out the things they have. He asks, “What was the sorry for?”

Thomas exhales in a gust that’s almost a laugh but the answer spills out easy. “For making it sound like I needed you to stay alive for me. That’s not something that you should have to deal with and it’s not what I meant.”

Newt remembers when wanting to live for himself wasn’t enough, and he didn’t lie when he said he wasn’t that person any more. He wants to be alive now, he has for a long time, and knowing it’s for Thomas too isn’t asking anything of him he wasn’t already willing to give. He thinks that’s maybe what Thomas meant.

He tips his head to gesture vaguely. “Look around,” he points out, “we’re in a camp and the world’s gone. We all fought to get here alive, but we’re staying sane because of each other. It’s not something I have to deal with, Thomas. So if I swear to be careful, and if you can promise me that too...does that mean we’re okay for now?”

(Maybe it’s not the most healthy thing, but they can work on that. At least for a little bit, Newt thinks they’ve earned this).

Thomas swallows hard.

“For now, yeah. I did kiss you, though, so where does that work in?”

Newt tilts his head and is suddenly acutely aware of hope burning into what feels like happiness under his skin; white hot and blazing. He’s closer now, close enough to touch, and he doesn’t remember crossing the distance. He says, “That’s part of the deal,” because even though neither of them would hold the other to it, it’s the answer they both want.

“Done,” Thomas says.

Newt doesn’t know who reaches out first, but it's a good thing Thomas shut the door, because it suddenly has to take their combined weight as Newt presses him back against it. Newt’s hoodie gets abandoned on the floor, Thomas’ t-shirt gets discarded at the foot of the bed. There’s a bruise near his ribs that looks days old and mostly faded that Newt’s never seen, but that he can link to a story about a mishap with some firewood. Thomas’ fingers skitter, feather-light around the shallow cut from the wild boar before his mouth moves past it.

“You’re real to me, too,” Newt says to him later, and it’s still the easiest thing he’s ever done.

༻༺

Newt wakes up in the middle of the night, and for a moment he’s not sure why.

It’s not like he has nightmares every time he sleeps, but he’s also not used to laying in the dark, thrown awake when one isn’t responsible. There’s no disfigured spectres clustered around the bed with their hollow eyes and rotting flesh and there’s no chill in his bones or memory of the knife in his hand.

The room is empty, the bed warm and there’s just a foggy sort of sweetness in his bloodstream from the alcohol at the bonfire.

The mattress shifts beside him, and Thomas twists a little closer with a soft sound that comes to rest molten and low in Newt’s stomach.

“You okay?” Thomas asks. His voice is hazy and out of focus and the words spill onto Newt’s bare skin.

“Yeah,” Newt says quietly.

He’s not fine. He’s still got ghosts and demons, scars and broken pieces with jagged edges, but they all do. Maybe in time they’ll wear smooth and he won’t cut himself on them any more; like glass left in the sea. Even if he always has them, though, he thinks he’s learning to live with them. Maybe he’s not fine, but he thinks he is happy. He is okay.

He smiles faintly up at the dark ceiling and curls his fingers around Thomas’ wrist until the pulse there beats against his thumb. The truth tastes different.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”

༻༺


End file.
